Facebook's learning curve with user data

As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg probably sees it, social networks are in the best position to aggregate all of the data that a user builds up online.

Targeted ads, after all, fund most of the web services we like to use for free, and have the potential to transform advertising into something that is relevant and useful to us, rather than just being an irritant.

The ad targeting systems and strategies that develop will inform the rest of the web's businesses over time - including this one - but it's a big responsibility and a challenge being on the frontline trying to figure out exactly what those strategies are.

Facebook has been dealing with a backlash against its new Beacon ads system, which aggregates data about users' activity on external sites and uses that to pitch ads to friends.

The introduction of the now-ubiquitous newsfeed caused a stink among Facebook users when it launched at the end of last summer, and the criticism came thick and fast. But this time it was perhaps mire from industry watchers than from users themselves; as Valleywag points out, nearly 600,000 users joined a protest group in one day.

So founder Mark Zuckerberg has relented, albeit a little late in the opinion of some. Fending off those accusations of Big Brotherism, Zuckerberg said: "We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologise for it."

As a result, Beacon is now opt in, rather than hard to opt out of. And given the bad press around this, Facebook may now struggle to encourage users that to some extent, the site needs to use their data if it is to progress. See it as R&D for the rest of the web, but let's not throw the Facebook baby out with the bathwater.

• While there might be something of a Facebook backlash among early adopters, the site is just hitting a seam in Paris, I hear, and the latest stats from compete in the US show its unique user number rising 20% from October to November.

• Most users, it is fair to say, either know or won't care about the privacy debate - but they will care that Facebook has tweaked the note it send you when you receive a message on the site. You'll now get a preview of the message, so you can see if it's worth checking out or not. Small mercies...